Monday, December 29, 2014

I getting just as tired of the Left's version of the Tea Party as I am of the Right's Tea PartyFind
Democrats who support the Middle Class people of all races along with
Working Class and Poverty Class people of all races and get behind
them. Get rid of the self centered identity politics groups who refuse
to work with others.From Alternet:http://www.alternet.org/time-abandon-democrats?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Progressives have no power in a corporate, focus-grouped, Wall Street-leaning party.

The
Democrats’ conduct since the midterm debacle is as sad and sorry as the
campaign that caused it. The party’s leaders are a big problem. A
bigger one is the closed system of high-dollar fundraising, reductionist
polling and vapid messaging in which it is seemingly trapped. Some say a
more populist Democratic Party will soon emerge. It won’t happen as
long as these leaders and this system are in place.

Nancy Pelosi
says it wasn’t a wave election. She’s right. It was the Johnstown Flood;
as catastrophic and just as preventable. One year after the shutdown
Republicans scored their biggest Senate win since 1980 and their biggest
House win since 1928. Turnout was the lowest since 1942, when millions
of GIs had the excellent excuse of being overseas fighting for their
country.

Every Democratic alibi — midterm lull, sixth-year curse,
red Senate map, vote suppression, gerrymandering, money — rings true,
but all of them together can’t explain being swept by the most extreme
major party in American history. Citing other statistics — demography,
presidential turnout, Hillary’s polls — they assure us that in 2016
happy days will be here again. Don’t bet on it.

It took more than
the usual civic sloth to produce the lowest turnout in 72 years. It took
alienating vast voting blocs, including the young and the working class
of both genders and all races. The young now trend Republican. Voters
of all ages migrate to third parties or abandon politics altogether.
It’s the biggest Democratic defection since the South switched parties
in the 1960s. If Democrats don’t change their ways, their 2016 turnout
will be a lot harder to gin up than they think.

Democrats are in
denial regarding the magnitude and meaning of their defeat. It is a
rejection not just of current leaders but of the very business model of
the modern Democratic Party: how it uses polls and focus groups to slice
and dice us; how it peddles its sly, hollow message and, worst, how it
sells its soul to pay for it all. Party elites hope party activists will
seek to lift their moods via the cheap adrenaline high of another
campaign. For once, activists may resist the urge.

The vital task
for progressives isn’t reelecting Democrats but rebuilding a strong,
independent progressive movement. Our history makes clear that without
one, social progress in America is next to impossible. For 100 years
progressive social change movements transformed relations between labor
and capital, buyers and sellers, blacks and whites, men and women, our
species and our planet. But in the 1970s progressives began to be
coopted and progress ceased. Their virtual disappearance into the
Democratic Party led to political stultification and a rollback of many
of their greatest achievements.

ISTANBUL,
Dec 22 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has described birth
control as a form of "treason," saying it threatened the country's
bloodline.

Erdogan urged a newly married couple at their wedding
late on Sunday to have at least three children to help boost Turkish
population figures, a common refrain from the president, who worries a
declining birth rate may undermine economic growth.

"For years
they committed a treason of birth control in this country, seeking to
dry up our bloodline. Lineage is very important both economically and
spiritually," he told the couple after serving as their witness at the
wedding. A video of the speech was posted on the mainstream Radikal news
website.

Last month, Erdogan, a devout Muslim, said it was
unnatural to consider women and men equal and said feminists did not
understand the importance of motherhood. In 2012, he sought to
effectively outlaw abortion, but later dropped the plan amid a public
outcry.

Erdogan regularly faces criticism for an authoritarian style of rule after 11 years in power.

Turkey's
population growth has been slowing in recent years and the live-birth
rate hovered at 2.07 percent last year, according to official
statistics. (Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Oyster
herpes (no relation to human herpes), also known as Pacific Oyster
Mortality Syndrome, has killed the shellfish across Europe, New Zealand
and Australia — in one particularly brutal case, the University of
Sydney’s Richard Whittington told Bloomberg, wiping out 10 million
oysters in just three days. France has been hit especially hard, its
harvest now 26 percent below where it was in 2008, when the virus first
appeared.

Crucially, experts say, the virus doesn’t begin to kill
its victims until water temperatures reach about 61 degrees Fahrenheit
or higher — global warming, in other words, could be contributing to its
potency. After all, not only is 2014 likely to be the hottest year on
record, according to a recently released report
from the World Meteorological Organization, but it’s also been marked
by record high sea surface temperatures. And it’s only going to get
worse.

The full story of what’s killing off oysters at such an
alarming rate is still something of a mystery, but herpes isn’t the only
factor contributing to die-offs. Quartz points to the increasing acidification
of the oceans, yet another consequence of human carbon emissions,
that’s literally dissolving the shells of oysters, scallops and other
shellfish.

Due to the specific nature of Pacific Northwest wind patterns, shellfish in that area are currently facing the greatest risk: a massive die-off there, which also occurred in 2008, caused the population to plummet.

“I
think the oyster industry is kind of the canary in the mineshaft,” Dave
Nisbet, an oyster farmer who saw production drop 42 percent by 2012, told Al
Jazeera of acidification’s growing threat. “I think we’re kind of the
first ones, the first ones to really identify and be able to have a
direct linkage to the acidification part of global warming.”

Monday, December 22, 2014

In
2006, while in Indonesia and six months pregnant, Abigail Haworth
became one of the few journalists ever to see young girls being
'circumcised'. Until now she has been unable to tell this shocking story

It's 9.30am on a Sunday, and the mood inside the school building in Bandung, Indonesia,
is festive. Mothers in headscarves and bright lipstick chat and eat
coconut cakes. Javanese music thumps from an assembly hall. There are
400 people crammed into the primary school's ground floor. It's hot,
noisy and chaotic, and almost everyone is smiling.

Twelve-year-old
Suminah is not. She looks like she wants to punch somebody. Under her
white hijab, which she has yanked down over her brow like a hoodie, her
eyes have the livid, bewildered expression of a child who has been
wronged by people she trusted. She sits on a plastic chair, swatting
away her mother's efforts to placate her with a party cup of milk and a
biscuit. Suminah is in severe pain. An hour earlier, her genitals were
mutilated with scissors as she lay on a school desk.During the
morning, 248 Indonesian girls undergo the same ordeal. Suminah is the
oldest, the youngest is just five months. It is April 2006 and the
occasion is a mass ceremony to perform sunat perempuan or "female circumcision" that has been held annually since 1958 by the Bandung-based Yayasan Assalaam,
an Islamic foundation that runs a mosque and several schools. The
foundation holds the event in the lunar month of the Prophet Muhammad's
birthday, and pays parents 80,000 rupiah (£6) and a bag of food for each
daughter they bring to be cut.

It is well established that female
genital mutilation (FGM) is not required in Muslim law. It is an
ancient cultural practice that existed before Islam, Christianity and
Judaism. It is also agreed across large swathes of the world that it is
barbaric. At the mass ceremony, I ask the foundation's social welfare
secretary, Lukman Hakim, why they do it. His answer not only predates
the dawn of religion, it predates human evolution: "It is necessary to
control women's sexual urges," says Hakim, a stern, bespectacled man in
a fez. "They must be chaste to preserve their beauty."

I have not
written about the 2006 mass ceremony until now. I went there with an
Indonesian activist organisation that worked within communities to
eradicate FGM. Their job was difficult and highly sensitive. Afterwards,
in fraught exchanges with the organisation's staff, it emerged that it
was impossible for me to write a journalistic account of the event for
the western media without compromising their efforts. It would destroy
the trust they had forged with local leaders, the activists argued, and
jeopardise their access to the people they needed to reach. I shelved my
article; to sabotage the people working on the ground to stop the abuse
would defeat the purpose of whatever I wrote. Such is the tricky
partnership of journalism and activism at times.

Yet far from
scaling down, the problem of FGM in Indonesia has escalated sharply. The
mass ceremonies in Bandung have grown bigger and more popular every
year. This year, the gathering took place in February. Hundreds of girls
were cut. The Assalaam foundation's website described it as "a
celebration". Anti-FGM campaigners have proved ineffective against a
rising tide of conservatism. Today, the issue is more that I can't not
write about that day.

The
situation for Syrian women has worsened since July at the hands of
Islamic State, said Valerie Amos, the UN's under-secretary-general for
humanitarian affairs and emergency relief.

She described how
women and female children as young as 12 are enslaved and sexually
abused. "Women captured as slaves by [Islamic State] have been sold in
markets in Raqqa. Some are sold to individual men. Others are kept by
[Islamic State] in rest houses and face multiple rapes by fighters
returning from the battlefield," Amos reported during a UN Security
Council session on Monday.

"Kurdish refugees from Kobani reported the capture of young girls by [Islamic State] for sexual purposes, girls as young as 12."

Amos
said there has also been a rise in the incidence of forced marriage.
"This is in part due to a depletion of family resources and more
recently because parents are terrified of their daughters being forced
to marry [Islamic State] fighters in areas under their control."

She
called these and other horrible acts war crimes. "[Islamic State] has
carried out mass victimization of civilians including murder,
enslavement, rape, forcible displacement and torture, and has violated
its obligation toward civilians."

Amos spoke harshly about the
lack of progress since the Security Council passed Resolution 2139 in
February, which laid out a number of basic human rights demands that the
Syrian government and opposition fighters must follow.

Amos
criticized the international community for becoming numb in the face of
almost 200,000 deaths in Syria, with millions more injured and
displaced. She said that Syrian refugees now account for a fifth of the
world's number of displaced people.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

For
many American workers, this is the time of year for tying up loose ends
and taking it easy. For Simon Ting, this is the time of year for
working harder than ever.

Ting, 24, works at a Macy’s in San
Francisco, and he’s paid largely on commission. That means the more he
sells, the more money he makes -- and the holiday season is a great time
for selling. Ting tries to be at Macy’s for as many of the store’s
extended hours as he can during the holiday rush. He knows sales will be
hard to come by after New Year’s. In past holiday seasons, when he
staffed other retailers’ stores, Ting worked so much he slept on the
stockroom floor between shifts.

“I get a really massive amount of
my paycheck during these two months, so I have to save that money,” Ting
said. “After the holiday season is over, no one is really in the store
anymore, and you don’t make any money anymore. That’s going to be really
rough.”

Ting isn’t alone. A steady paycheck has grown elusive for
many Americans in an economic recovery dominated by part-time, low-wage
work. That work is often in retail, where the holiday season is a time
to put in as many hours as possible -- sometimes at multiple jobs and on
holidays like Thanksgiving
-- to build a cushion for leaner months. Those leaner months often come
right after the holidays, as stores hire less, lay off seasonal
employees and cut permanent workers’ hours to cope with slower sales.

Retail companies typically boost payrolls by 3 percent to 4 percent from October to December, according to a Pew Research Center analysis
of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s followed by a 5 percent to 6
percent decline in retail payrolls from December to February.

“If
you’re looking for extra money, or that’s the only job you can find,
that’s better than nothing, but it’s certainly not something you can
build a life on,” said Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew who
conducted the analysis.

The people lucky enough to work for a
retailer year-round typically make less after Christmas ends.
Rank-and-file employees at clothing and clothing accessories stores made
$266.64 a week, on average, in December 2013, according to BLS data that is not seasonally adjusted. The following month, that number fell to $248.35.

Bay Area protests over the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown
and scores of others may assuage white liberal guilt and provide a
righteous reason to rail against the machine, but it would be nice to
actually hear from some black folks.

So far, it seems all I’ve
seen and heard in three weeks of protest are some pretty vocal white
folks screaming to have their way, or dismissing the actions of the
wolves inside the flock as the ugly backside of democracy.

Assault, vandalism and looting are not protected forms of free speech.

In
Oakland, black religious leaders who have traditionally stood front and
center in every successful civil rights movement were not part of the
revolution this time.

Their conspicuous absence has led to marches
that, quite frankly, appear to be more about white rage than black
empowerment. It’s more about what they want than it is about what
African American communities truly need.

Black leadership whether
from churches or community organizations would add credibility, foster
communication and bridge the gap between demonstrators and middle-aged
and older African Americans who’ve been down this road before.

“I’m waiting for someone to say all black lives matter, whether they are being killed by police officers or other young black men,” said Bishop Bob Jackson, the African American pastor at Acts Full Gospel Church, which has more than 12,000 congregants from across the Bay Area.“I like the mantra, but if we’re going to do it, let’s do it right.”

The
annual Martin Luther Day King March planned for Oakland will call on
police officers as well as citizens who resolve disputes with violence
to declare a moratorium on all killings of black men, Jackson said.

But
in an era where Sunday church services take a backseat to weekend sales
and football games, that influence and their message is waning.

“The clergy in Oakland have not really come together,” said Bishop Joseph Simmons, pastor at Greater St. Paul Church
in West Oakland. “We’re still trying to figure out where we fit in in
all of this. This generation doesn’t have respect for the church, and we
don’t have the power we once had.”All the same, the violence,
vandalism and looting that have been part of the demonstrations in
Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco have disappointed some of the black
community leaders.

“When you see protesters taking the opportunity
to loot stores and burn stuff, it doesn’t help preserve the memories of
young men like Brown and Garner,” Jackson said. “Using their deaths as
an excuse to terrorize innocent citizens, loot, rob and destroy only
hurts our cause.”

Unlike Vegas, Whole Foods' clientele are all about
mindfulness and compassion... until they get to the parking lot. Then
it's war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the
crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her
and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says
'NAMASTE'. Poor lady didn't even hear him approaching because he was
driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther.

As the great,
sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall
of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave
behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the
land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then
think about Whole Foods; they're basically the same.

The first
thing I see is the great wall of kombucha -- 42 different kinds of
rotten tea. Fun fact: the word kombucha is Japanese for 'I gizzed in
your tea.' Anyone who's ever swallowed the glob of mucus at the end of
the bottle knows exactly what I'm talking about. I believe this thing is
called "The Mother," which makes it that much creepier.

Next I
see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from
various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this
aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever
notice that you don't meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten
intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I
call a rich, white person problem. You know you've really made it in
this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is
something you get from too much hot yoga. All I'm saying is if I were a
yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.

Next I approach
the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put
your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They
calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and
compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as
it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent
of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males
the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you
will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face,
in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3
is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is
apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After
contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their
product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is
maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty
good deal when you think about it.

I grab a handful of peanut
butter pretzels on my way out of this stupid aisle. I don't feel bad
about pilfering these bites because of the umpteen times that I've
overpaid at the salad bar and been tricked into buying $108 beauty
creams. The pretzels are very fattening but I'm already in the
seventieth percentile of ugly so who cares.

Dems taking pride in FDR's historic legacy need to reckon with a basic truth: The party is now firmly anti-New Deal

In
the aftermath of the shellacking they took in the midterm congressional
and state elections, many Democrats are calling for their party to
return to its New Deal roots.

This
is inadvertently comical. The present-day Democratic Party has next to
nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society. Today’s Democratic Party is a completely different
party, which coalesced between 1968 and 1980. And this half-century-old
party has been anti-New Deal from the very beginning.

Now that I have your attention, allow me to explain.

While
there have been two parties called “the Democrats” and “the
Republicans” since the mid-19th century, these enduring labels mask the
fact that party coalitions change every generation or two. Franklin
Roosevelt created a new party under the old name of “the Democrats” by
welding ex-Republican Progressives in the North together with the old
Jacksonian Farmer-Labor coalition. The contentious issue of civil
rights nearly destroyed the Roosevelt Democrats in 1948 — and finally
wrecked it in 1968, when George Wallace’s third party campaign proved to
be a way-station for many working-class whites en route from the
Democrats to the Republicans.

Today’s Democratic Party, in
contrast, took shape between 1968 and 1980. Although George McGovern
lost the 1972 presidential race to Richard Nixon in a landslide, the
McGovernites of the “New Politics” movement wrested control of the
Democratic Party from the old state politicians and urban bosses of the
Roosevelt-to-Johnson New Deal coalition. Robert Kennedy’s aide Fred
Dutton, one of the architects of the disempowerment of the old New Deal
elite, called for a new coalition of young people, college-educated
suburbanites and minorities in his 1971 book “Changing Sources of Power:
Politics in the 1970s.” Sound familiar? That’s because, nearly half a
century later, the same groups are the core constituents of today’s
Democrats.

Jimmy Carter was the first New Politics president (or
New Democrat or neoliberal, as they were later called). He was a
center-right Southern governor who ran against big government and touted
his credentials as a rich businessman. He did not get along with
organized labor, one of the key constituencies of the Roosevelt
Democrats. His major domestic policy achievement was dismantling New
Deal regulation of transportation like trucking and air travel. He
appointed a Federal Reserve chairman from Wall Street, Paul Volcker, who
created an artificial recession, the worst between the Great Depression
and the Great Recession, to cripple American unions, whose wage demands
were blamed for inflation.

Even before Carter’s election, the
Democratic “class of ’74” in Congress wrested power from the old largely
Southern politicians of the New Deal era. The northern Irish
Catholic-Southern alliance, symbolized by House Speakers Tip O’Neill and
Jim Wright, gave way among congressional Democrats to a new
Northeastern-West Coast domination, beginning with Democratic House
Speaker Tom Foley, of the state of Washington. Many of these younger
Democrats were deficit hawks, like Bill Bradley of New York and Paul
Tsongas of Massachusetts. Democrats like these supported the 1983
Social Security “reform,” which cut Social Security benefits by raising
the formal retirement age from 65 to 67. In his 1984 presidential
campaign, Carter’s former vice-president, Fritz Mondale, made deficit
reduction his central issue.

We need a press that teaches the young to be agents of people, not power.

Why
has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and
distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of
rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and theWashington
Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught
to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low
purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the
essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not
information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is
facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United
States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually
China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by
journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the
bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous
and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as
Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the
government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its
principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability
to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a
media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by
media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly
line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to
create a new “reality” has been building for a long time. Forty-five
years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation.
On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will
not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the
individual.”

I was a correspondent in the United States at the
time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a
young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling
and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection
could change the world.

The economist explains why the continent's woes keep him up at night

So warns Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in his New York Times column today,
which examines the continent’s “slow-motion disaster.” As Krugman
notes, the United States and Europe are diverging in their economic
paths: while the U.S. seems to be slowly but surely recovering from the
financial crisis, Europe is in the midst of another, with high
unemployment and a looming risk of deflation. Why is the continent
staring down the economic abyss? “The conventional wisdom among European
policy makers is that we’re looking at the price of irresponsibility,”

If you
want to know how Europe reached its current state of affairs, don’t look
to the continent’s traditional scapegoats. “[T]he bad behavior at the
core of Europe’s slow-motion disaster isn’t coming from Greece, or
Italy, or France,” Krugman contends. “It’s coming from Germany.”

Purveyors
of the standard narrative about the European economy depict countries
like Greece, Italy, and France as racked with high labor costs and
reckless fiscal policies. But this narrative is bunk; just glance at
some of the data:

Since the euro came into existence in 1999, France’s G.D.P. deflator (the
average price of French-produced goods and services) has risen 1.7
percent per year, while its unit labor costs have risen 1.9 percent
annually. Both numbers are right in line with the European Central
Bank’s target of slightly under 2 percent inflation, and similar to what
has happened in the United States. Germany, on the other hand, is way
out of line, with price and labor-cost growth of 1 and 0.5 percent,
respectively.

Moreover, Krugman writes, costs are
coming under control in Spain and Italy. And as for the argument that
fiscal irresponsibility is wrecking economies, Krugman points out that
France’s borrowing costs are barely higher than Germany’s; there’s no
fiscal crisis on the horizon.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

The rise of smartphones and social media has ushered in a new age of techno-optimism. And that's a big problem

Charles HowarthSaturday, Nov 29, 2014The
technology pages of news media can make for scary reading these days.
From new evidence of government surveillance to the personal data
collection capabilities of new devices, to the latest leaks of personal
information, we hear almost daily of new threats to personal privacy.
It’s difficult to overstate the implications of this: The separation of
the private and public that’s the cornerstone of liberal thought, not to
mention the American Constitution, is being rapidly eroded, with
potentially profound consequences for our freedom.

As
much as we may register a certain level of dismay at this, in practice,
our reaction is often indifference. How many of us have taken to the
streets in protest, started a petition, canvassed a politician, or even
changed our relationship with our smartphone, tablet or smartwatch? The
question is why are we so unconcerned?

We could say that it’s
simply a matter of habit, that we have become so used to using devices
in such a way that we cannot imagine using them any differently. Or we
could, for example, invoke a tragic fate in which we simply have no
option but to accept the erosion of our privacy because of our
powerlessness against corporations and governments.

These are,
however, retrospective justifications that miss the kernel of the truth.
To reach this kernel, we have to excavate the substratum of culture to
uncover the ideas that shape our relationship with technology. Only here
can we see that the cause is a profound ideological shift in this
relationship.Over the last few hundred years, it has been one
characterized by deep ambivalence. On the one hand, we have viewed
technology as emancipatory, and even, as David Nye, James Carey and
other scholars have argued, as divine. On the other hand, we have seen
it as dehumanizing, alienating and potentially manipulative — a
viewpoint shaped by historical figures as diverse as William Blake, Mark
Twain, Mary Shelley, Charlie Chaplin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ned Lud,
Samuel Beckett and Karl Marx. However, over the last 20 years or so,
this latter perspective has largely been thrown out of the window.

There
are many areas of culture that witness this shift, but none does so as
lucidly as science fiction film. Even when set in the future, science
fiction explodes onto the silver screen the ideas held about technology
in the present. Indeed, the success of many of the best science fiction
films is undoubtedly because they illustrate their time’s hopes and
fears about technology so clearly.

Those of the late 20th century
clearly suggest the prevalence in American culture of the old fearful
view of technology. The 1980s, for example, saw the advent of personal
computing, innovation in areas like genetic engineering and robotics,
job losses brought about by industrial mechanization, and the creation
of futuristic military technologies such as the Strategic Defense
Initiative (aka Star Wars).

Lo
and behold, the science fiction films of the time betray cultural fears
of keeping up with the pace of change. Many explore the dehumanizing
effects of technology, depicting worlds where humans have lost control.
“Terminator,” for example, conjoins fears of mechanization and
computing. The human protagonists are powerless to kill Schwarzenegger’s
cyborg directly; it ultimately meets its end via another piece of
industrial technology (a hydraulic press). Another classic of the era,
“Blade Runner,” is a complex thought experiment on the joining of
technology and humans as hybrids. The antagonist, Roy, whom Harrison
Ford’s Deckard must kill, represents the horrific synthesis of
unfettered human ambition and technological potency.

Six years after the global financial crisis hit, we still aren't out of the woods

Six years after the global economy reached the edge of the precipice, what have economic elites learned about policymaking?

Not much, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman laments in his New York Times column today.Mainstream economic scholarship tells us that the normal rules don’t apply in a “rock-bottom economy,” Krugman writes:

Government
spending doesn’t compete with private investment — it actually promotes
business spending. Central bankers, who normally cultivate an image as
stern inflation-fighters, need to do the exact opposite, convincing
markets and investors that they will push inflation up. “Structural reform,” which usually means making it easier to cut wages, is more likely to destroy jobs than create them.

Still,
Very Serious People insisted otherwise, claiming that the most urgent
threat confronting the country was the federal budget deficit, demanding
sharp cuts in interest rates lest hyperinflation begin at any moment,
and championing a belt-tightening austerity regime. As Krugman points
out, some policymakers — including at the European Central Bank — heeded
this disastrous advice, and the continent hasn’t recovered since.

And
don’t be fooled by indicators that suggest the global economy is — if
not out of the woods — slowly emerging, Krugman cautions:

It’s
true that with the U.S. unemployment rate dropping, most analysts
expect the Fed to raise interest rates sometime next year. But inflation
is low, wages are weak, and the Fed seems to realize that raising rates
too soon would be disastrous. Meanwhile, Europe looks further than ever
from economic liftoff, while Japan is still struggling to escape from
deflation. Oh, and China, which is starting to remind some of us of
Japan in the late 1980s, could join the rock-bottom club sooner than you
think.

So the
counterintuitive realities of economic policy at the zero lower bound
are likely to remain relevant for a long time to come, which makes it
crucial that influential people understand those realities.
Unfortunately, too many still don’t; one of the most striking aspects of
economic debate in recent years has been the extent to which those
whose economic doctrines have failed the reality test refuse to admit
error, let alone learn from it. The intellectual leaders of the new
majority in Congress still insist that we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel; German officials still insist that the problem is that debtors haven’t suffered enough.

The first thing to say about Naomi’s Klein’s latest book is that its title makes a grand promise, This Changes Everything –
and that’s before you even get to the subtitle, which sets up a
face-off between capitalism on one side and the climate on the other.
The second thing to say is that no single book could ever meet such a
promise. Klein, with careful aplomb, does not attempt to do so. Rather,
she offers a tour of the horizon upon which we will meet our fates. Or,
rather, the horizon upon which we will attempt to change them.

In
the face of such huge topics, Klein’s strategy is a practical one. She
defers the problem of capitalism-in-itself (as German philosophers used
to call it) and focuses instead on our era’s particular type of
capitalism – the neoliberal capitalism of boundless privatization and
deregulation, of markets-über-alles ideology and oligarchic
billionaires. Her central argument is not (as some have insisted) that
capitalism has to go before we can begin to save ourselves, but rather
that we’re going to have to get past neoliberalism if we want to face
the greater challenges. Klein writes:

Some say there
is no time for this transformation; the crisis is too pressing and the
clock is ticking. I agree that it would be reckless to claim that the
only solution to this crisis is to revolutionize our economy and revamp
our worldview from the bottom up – and anything short of that is not
worth doing. There are all kinds of measures that would lower emissions
substantively that could and should be done right now. But we aren’t
taking those measures, are we?

At the outset Klein
asks the obvious question: Why haven’t we, in the face of existential
danger, mobilized to lower emissions? There are lots of reasons, but one
stands above all others. We have not mobilized because “market
fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically
sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came
knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith.” In other words
the climate crisis came with spectacularly “bad timing.” The severity of
the danger became clear at the very time when “there-is-no-alternative”
capitalism was rising to ideological triumph, foreclosing the exact
remedies (long-term planning, stricter government regulation, collective
action) that could address the crisis. It’s a crucial insight, and it
alone justifies the price of admission.

Klein reports that her
“environmentalist friends” constantly ask her, “Do you have to say
‘capitalism’?” It’s a great laugh line, but it’s important to
acknowledge that the question is a fair one. Because if capitalism – the
hard core of our woe-begotten economy – is the problem, then our
near-impossible task becomes even more difficult. Given her animus
against neoliberalism (see her previous bestsellers, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine),
you might expect her to agree that vocal anti-capitalism is
unnecessary; neoliberalism is quite enough to fear all by itself. But
Klein is playing another game, and it requires her to call things by
their proper names. In this sense she may not even be an
environmentalist, at least not in the old sense of the word. The modern
American green movement has so long strained to avoid charges of
anti-capitalism that you could write its history in terms of this
avoidance. Such a history would recount endless screeds against
“industrialism,” “technology,” “reductionism,” “patriarchy,”
“overpopulation,” and, lately, even agriculture. All of these, no doubt,
have something to teach us, but absent a coherent understanding of
political economy, they shade together into noise and confusion.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

You don’t owe anyone an explanation for your abortion. But with so many women being shamed, shouldn’t we speak out?

Jessica ValentiThursday 20 November 2014I
know a woman in her 30s: she’s married, she has a toddler, and she
desperately wants a second child – but a dangerous medical condition
means that having another baby would be life-threatening. Despite being
careful, she got pregnant. She had an abortion because she wasn’t
willing to risk her life and leave her child motherless, but she still
feels a deep sadness. I know another woman, in her 20s, who
had a shitty boyfriend (but no kids) when her birth control failed and
she found herself with a pregnancy she knew she didn’t want – a
pregnancy she wasn’t ready for. She was upset about the situation, but
had no doubts about what she wanted to do and, after the abortion, no
regrets. She rarely thinks about the pregnancy or the abortion anymore.

If
you’re like a lot of people, you probably have much more sympathy for
the first woman than the second. Though the majority of people in America and Northern Ireland
and so many other places believe abortion should be legal, too many of
us still think about reproductive rights as if there’s a hierarchy of
good and bad abortions – the kind that women “deserve”, and the kind
women should be ashamed of.

I’ve written
about ending my wanted pregnancy and the turmoil I faced with the
decision, but I’ve never before spoken publicly about my first abortion –
not because I was ashamed, but because it truly didn’t have that
tremendous of an impact on my life. If anything, being able to have that
abortion made my life better: I was able to publish my first book, meet
my now-husband, cultivate the life that I’m living and build the family
that I love.

Robert ReichMonday, November 24, 2014This
is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when
I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.

The
answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come
to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why
it’s worth going to college.

Put simply, people with college
degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that
college “premium” keeps rising.

Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees.

In the early 1980s, graduates earned 64 percent more.

So
even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college
degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.

But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.

In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
46 percent of recent college graduates are now working in jobs that
don’t require college degrees. (The same is true for more than a third
of college graduates overall.)

Their employers still choose college grads over non-college grads on the assumption that more education is better than less.

As
a result, non-grads are being pushed into ever more menial work, if
they can get work at all. Which is a major reason why their pay is
dropping.

What’s going on? For years we’ve been told globalization
and technological advances increase the demand for well-educated
workers. (Confession: I was one of the ones making this argument.)

This was correct until around 2000. But since then two things have reversed the trend.

Sanders explained during an interview on CNN that he had
been traveling the country to determine if he would have the necessary
support for a presidential run in 2016.

“I’m giving some thought
to it,” he said. “Taking on the billionaire class, and Wall Street, and
the Koch brothers is not an easy task.”

“How are you going to get
elected president if you take on the billionaire class?” CNN host Chris
Cuomo snarked. “Don’t you watch the elections?”

“I’m going to be
very honest with you,” Sanders replied. “We may have reached the tipping
point where candidates who are fighting for the working class and the
middle class of this country may not be able do it anymore because of
the power of the billionaire class.”

“That’s the simple reality,”
he continued. “And I have got to ascertain — if I do it, I want to do it
well. If I do it, I know that I will need millions of people engaged in
a real grassroots campaign to take on big money, and to fight for an
agenda, a jobs program, raising the minimum wage, pay equity for women,
dealing with climate change, all of these things.”

Nixon's lies and Reagan's charms created the space for Clinton, Carter and Obama to redefine (and gut) liberalism

“The Invisible Bridge” is
the third installment in Rick Perlstein’s grand history of
conservatism, and like its predecessors, the book is filled with
startling insights. It is the story of a time much like our own—the
1970s, which took America from the faith-crushing experience of
Watergate to economic hard times and, eventually, to a desperate
enthusiasm for two related figures: the nostalgic presidential aspirant
Ronald Reagan, and the “anti-politician” Jimmy Carter. (I discussed
Perlstein’s views on Carter in this space a few weeks ago.)

In
blending cultural with political history, “The Invisible Bridge”
strikes me as an obvious addition to any list of nonfiction
masterpieces. But I also confess to being biased: Not only do I feel
nostalgia for many of the events the book describes—Hank Aaron’s pursuit
of the home run record, for example—but I have been friends with Rick
since long ago, when he was in college and The Baffler was publishing
his essays. I interviewed Rick on an Amtrak train traveling from Seattle
to Portland, Oregon, a few weeks ago (we were there to do readings from
a new anthology of essays); here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Let’s
talk Watergate. It’s a Republican scandal, obviously, but here’s the
thing: It’s liberalism that has never really recovered. Think about it.
Your book starts with Watergate and ends with…well, it doesn’t quite get to the triumph of Reagan, but it comes close.

That’s
a profound question. That’s deep. I think that liberalism indeed has
never really recovered from Watergate in the following sense: It gave a
certain generation of Democrats — and we’ll talk about Gary Hart. . . .

Yeah. He’s going to come up.

It
gave a certain generation of Democrats an argument to take on the
Republicans at the exact same moment that a new political generation was
coming up that had indifference, at best, and contempt, at worst, for
the New Deal tradition. So you get this class of Congresspeople who
hadn’t really run for any office at all. Very young. Swept into office
in 1974, very much arguing on issues of corruption, to be sure, but also
lifestyle issues. Often they were representing new suburban
constituencies that had traditionally elected Republicans and their
spokesman was, in fact, this guy Gary Hart…

You’re getting
ahead of yourself here, Rick. There’s a more direct route — I probably
should have hinted at it — which is cynicism. That Watergate kicked up
this huge cultural contempt for government and all its works. \ For
government itself. Right, right. You know Ronald Reagan, his speech
announcing his surprise challenge against Gerald Ford for the Republican
nomination centered around this idea of the “buddy system” in
Washington.

It's more difficult for religions to control their believers’ access to information.

While
the burgeoning atheist movement loves throwing conferences and selling
books, a huge chunk--possibly most--of its resources go toward the
Internet. This isn’t borne out of laziness or a hostility to wearing
pants so much as a belief that the Internet is uniquely positioned as
the perfect tool for sharing arguments against religion with believers
who are experiencing doubts. It’s searchable, it allows back-and-forth
debate, and it makes proving your arguments through links much easier.
Above all else, it’s private. An online search on atheism is much easier
to hide than, say, a copy of The God Delusion on your nightstand.

In
recent months, this sense that the Internet is the key for atheist
outreach has started to move from “hunch” to actual, evidence-based
theory. Earlier this year, Allen Downey of the Olin College of
Engineering in Massachusetts examined the spike in people declaring they had no religion
that started in the '90s and found that while there are many factors
contributing to it--dropping familial pressure, increased levels of
college education--increased Internet usage was likely a huge part of
it, accounting for up to 25 percent of the decline in religious belief.
While cautioning that correlation does not mean causation, Downey did go
on to point out that since so many other factors were controlled for,
it’s a safe bet to conclude that the access to varied thought and debate
the Internet provides is persuading people to drop their religions.

But
in the past few months, that hypothesis grew even stronger when a major
American religion basically had to admit that Internet arguments
against their faith is putting them on their heels. The Church of Latter
Day Saints has quietly released a series of essays, put together by
church historians, addressing some of the less savory aspects of their
history, such as the practice of polygamy or the ban on black members.
The church sent out a memo
in September telling church leaders to direct believers who have
questions about their religion’s history to these essays, which they
presented as a counter to “detractors” who “spread misinformation and
doubt.”

While there are plenty of detractors who will share their
opinions offline, there’s little doubt that the bulk of the detractors
plaguing the church are explaining their views online, which is why this
has become a problem now for a church that used to act like it could exert total control
over believers’ access to information. One of the church historians,
Steven Snow, openly cited the internet as the source of the criticisms.
“There is so much out there on the Internet ,” he told the New York Times,
“that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to
get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of
these more difficult aspects of our history.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson